Bones on Bones
by bleeze brew
The world was born in a deluge. That's what they said. The world had always been covered in water, and it always would be. Some believed in the presence of dry land, somewhere. No one could say where. Many believed that it was just water all the way down. Why not? There was nothing but water to see.
After the mutant found himself driven out of the third floating town he'd tried to join—tried to help—he did not care about dry land. If they wanted dry land so badly, they could search for it. He could live in the water forever.
He tried to dive down low, to leave behind all those who refused to accept him. He didn't get very far before he grew tired and terrified, unable to see further than his hand in front of his face. The pressure of the water bore down on him uncomfortably, making him feel short of breath even with his gills. He broke surface soon after, gasping for air and shaking, his muscles cramping and spasming in their exhaustion. It took him three days to fully recover, and by the end of it he was lucky he hadn't been found and killed by some enterprising scavenger.
If he wanted to find out what lay in the depths, let alone live there, he obviously needed to prepare.
He trained for weeks, then for months. He got good, but all the while he struggled to pass the depths into darkness. It was too dangerous to go down below the shadows; a chance encounter with a very toothy fish vindicated the fact that he'd taken along his knife. He needed something to light the way, but fire couldn't burn under water.
Over a year later, he found what he needed.
He had given up on reaching the bottom by then. He had found a picked over ship's carcass, and scavenged it for anything useful. Whoever had come and gone before hadn't left much, but he'd gotten some string, some bones, some loose metals, and some weird little round sticks buried below the waterline. Figuring he might be able to use them to coil rope around or something, he took them along with everything else. It was only when he was toying them late at night that he realized what they really were. The sudden bright glare blinded him and caused him to reflexively hurl it away. As he was blinking away the spots in his vision, he realized that the evening was still a little brighter, but dimming quickly. He scrambled to the edge of his ship, peering down into the water.
The stick was sinking quickly, one end still on fire, bright as the sun. That was all he really needed to see for his plans to go to the bottom to come back. After a couple of tests, he was ready to go. He stuffed a bundle of five into his belt, and dove.
It was quiet, this time around. One small fish came round, fleeing as soon as he ignited the first stick. It flashed bright, hissing in the water. He kept swimming down, a tiny bubble of light in the deep, dark sea. The edges flickered just out of reach, the bubble threatening to pop only to be held off by the magnesium fire. He kept a close eye on it, replacing it when it began to grow dim, the darkness eating away at his limbs like eels.
He kept swimming down. Pressure bore down on him, but he was expecting that this time. It wasn't comfortable, but what was? Water gurgled in his ears as it passed through his gills, drowning out the fainter sounds of life, carried on the tides. With the darkness all around, he could almost forget which way was up. But he hadn't hit bottom yet. He kept going down.
The water grew cold the more the light faded. The peace was deep, so natural as to be primordial. Maybe there wasn't a bottom, after all. Maybe there was only water. Dark ocean, forever. It would serve them all right; land dwellers without land. That the world was made for him, not them. That they hoped and prayed and dreamed for something that was impossible.
The bright reflection in the distance brought him up short, peering into the darkness to see where it came from. He had never seen something like that in water before. Drawing closer slowly, ready to draw his knife, he found…bones.
The long ribs and spines that reached for the air above them were held down by something, the hide that stretched between them cold and clear but shot through with cracks. The size of the beast was incredible. Tugging its thick edged hide showed it was rigid—was glass. Not plastic, glass.
The mutant drew back in shock, the flare slipping from his fingers. He fumbled out another one, igniting it quickly. He was forced to blink away the spots in his vision from that, and returned to gaping at the structure. He'd never seen the like. A glance down showed the first flare sinking away, lighting even more of it. Light glinted off the glass, reflecting out into the dark to another structure.
No, he mouthed, awed by the size alone. The biggest town he'd ever heard of could fit in one of these ten times over, and there were two right next to each other? It was impossible. Had the entire world used to live down here, in these two things? Maybe they were remnants, he pondered, of sky ships. Maybe they'd used to sail the stars, and crashed here on a world of water. He'd heard speculations like that before, but he'd waved them off as unbelievable. But now….
With that in mind, he swam forward, gleeful to explore.
They weren't from the stars. That became clear quickly. And there weren't just two of them.
The bones of a city of thousands—millions—was drowned beneath their hulls. A city not everyone had escaped. The smaller bones of humans and animals were picked clean, their connective tissue gone to leave them in disorganized piles. Land vehicles sat abandoned, and plants had turned to sediment—mostly. The mutant stared at the jar of dirt in shock, at the little twigs that sat in dry air, dead from lack of light alone. They kept plants in closed off jars he thought mutely, clenching his hands around it in anger. They had so many they just trapped these ones away in glass for—what? A joke? They had dirt to seal away with them?
He'd found maps. He'd found books. He'd found the truth. The scrawled out words, painted on the walls, the streets, and sheets of metal. "We're sorry" and "we killed it." "The Great Flood will cleanse us" and "it was what we deserved."
Humans were at fault. Weren't they always?
Dry land was a myth. Dry land was a joke. Dry land…it didn't exist. Not anymore. It was just a forgotten memory, the bitterest sort of dream and the worst sort of hope.
He took the beautiful glass jar of dead plants from the bottom of the ocean, leaving the ancients behind to their self-flooded graves.
AN: I don't know why I decided to write about Waterworld. I don't even like Waterworld. And yet.